From The Sunday Times
May 3, 2009
Kazuo Ishiguro's work reflects the world
The author of Nocturnes is of Japanese heritage, has lived in Britain since he was five and writes with global awareness
Bryan Appleyard

Fourteen years ago, I interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro in his house in Golders Green. Here we are again. Not much has changed. I’ve aged, he hasn’t; there’s a home cinema in the house; and Naomi, his daughter, is thinking about Oxbridge rather than refining her toddling skills. Other than that, here’s Ish, still surrounded by street cherry blossom, still writing, still dwelling contentedly in the cosmopolitan suburbia of northwest London. “We have,” he says, “been very happy here.”
If you like your writers to be crushed by existential dread, mean-spirited, hard-drinking, man- or womanising, hanging out in low dives or haranguing the masses from high pulpits, then Ish is most definitely not your man. Ish does focused serenity and earnest calm. In manner he is exact, almost fussy, and in conversation analytically precise, almost pedantic. In his work, of course, he is a writer of cool brilliance. If I had to apply one word to Ish, it would be “sorted”, with all its vernacular overtones of invulnerability, autonomy and completion.

Yet he is unpredictable. Fourteen years ago, I was interviewing him about The Unconsoled, his astonishing, surreal fourth novel, which came as a shock after the solidish realism of A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day. This time it’s a collection of long short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Short stories may not be a shock, exactly, but they are, apparently, commercially unwise. “The publishers said that the market for a collection of short stories is less than a quarter of that for a novel. People don’t seem to like the effort of getting into a new world every few pages. I’m not worried about the sales, I’ve had more sales than I could ever have wished for. I just hope it gets to people who enjoy it.”
His last two novels, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, both sold 1m worldwide. Conscientiously, he promoted them through the commonplace but nonetheless bizarre mechanism of the book tour — a gruelling 18 months to two years of more or less identical interviews in an endless succession of countries. He’s not doing that this time — it is, he says, a “business decision”. If short stories don’t sell, he’s not losing so much of his writing time in hotels.
Importantly, though, his book tours have had a stylistic impact. “You spend your time,” he says, “being grilled by a lot of pretty insightful people who point things out about your style, your recurring themes, the ways you should and shouldn’t be writing. This — and the proliferation of writing schools — is having a huge impact on writing.” There is, in his imagination, something called “the Danish journalist effect”. Basically, tours make him supersensitive to the fact that he will often be read in translation, or by readers for whom English is a second or third language. “It means I mustn’t make assumptions based on the people I know in London, and I’ve always been aware that my prose must make sense in translation. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It's a habit I’ve got into.”

Read Bryan Appleyard's lengthy, excellent piece in full here.

Author pic at top of post by David Levene from The Guardian.